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North Korea’s Hunger

During 1995, the first full year of Kim Jong-il’s reign as the leader of the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, the country’s frogs disappeared. The explanation for this portent, it turned out, was that desperate villagers had hunted them to near-extinction.

The famine that unfolded in North Korea between 1995 and 1998 may someday be understood as the greatest man-made catastrophe of the first decades after the Cold War’s end. The number of dead is unknown. Credible estimates range from just above half a million to more than two million. That might be a greater toll than the Rwandan genocide and is approaching the scale of the estimated mortality from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s overlapping, longer-running civil wars. And yet, by comparison to those African disasters, the Great North Korean Famine, as the author Andrew S. Natsios labelled it in 2001, remains a muffled, muted, poorly documented event.

The public mourning of Kim Jong-il’s expiry this week has been constructed by the North Korean regime as a strategic spectacle. Staged on the anachronistic, Stalin-inspired boulevards of Pyongyang, the production blends mass coercion, martial formations, traditional rituals, and implied nuclear deterrence. To a great extent, the display is being interpreted in the West as its producers intended—as something awesome and ominous, masking uncertain and dangerous currents of power. The show is like a puffer fish bloating itself before its enemies.

The choreography echoes “The Red Detachment of Women,” the agitprop ballet mounted for the President Nixon’s visit to Beijing (unforgettably reënacted in Peter Sellars’s staging of the John Adams opera “Nixon in China”). Yet one of the lessons of the North Korean famine of 1995-1998 is to avoid being distracted by political theatre constructed by totalitarian regimes in their capital cities, especially at moments of crisis.

The famine descended in part because Kim Jong-il’s government managed, throughout the disaster, to maintain Pyongyang as a Potemkin metropolis of stable if threadbare socialism, deceiving even representatives of food charities who were stationed in the city. The regime cleared homeless and malnourished citizens from Pyongyang’s streets, and kept giving party cadres there decent rations even as the countryside’s public food-distribution system collapsed, for the most part invisibly to the outside world.

It will be years and perhaps decades before a full account of Kim Jong-il’s famine and the failed international response to it will be possible. Refugee and defector testimony, fragmentary eyewitness accounts, public-health statistics, agricultural statistics, and morbidity surveys carried out by academic researchers provide an outline of what happened, but only that.

We do know that, as with all modern famines, this one was a result of political failure. Peacetime famines in partially industrialized countries such as North Korea are very rare. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward famine of the early nineteen-sixties and the famine imposed upon Ukraine by Joseph Stalin during the thirties are perhaps comparable to the one that unfolded in North Korea after 1995; those earlier cases at least suggest the degree of political madness and suppression required to foster such a catastrophe.

The single individual most responsible was Kim Jong-il. He had assumed the leading place in North Korea’s military-dominated regime even before the passing, during the summer of 1994, of his father, Kim Il-sung, a communist who had been an anti-fascist hero of the Second World War, and became an unrelenting dictator.

North Korea’s ratio of population to arable land is one of the world’s most unfavorable. In the early nineties, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the advent of Chinese market reforms deprived the Pyongyang regime of external subsidies, on which it had previously relied. Decades of forced collectivization and other irrational agricultural and ecological practices had already degraded domestic food production. Massive military spending, corruption, and political favoritism undermined the country’s food-rationing system.

On top of all this came massive floods in August of 1995. The harvest failed, and the regime lacked the cash, credit, and forthrightness it needed to import emergency supplies. As famine spread, it targeted “the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law or betray a friend,” Barbara Demick writes in her exceptional book “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.” One of Demick’s female narrators recalls that in her family and among her friends, the “simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told—they were the first to die.”

Andrew Natsios, who worked for a charity that responded to the crisis and who then researched the famine and wrote a book about it, cites “many sources” who described North Korean families that chose to expel older members so the young would have more to eat, as well as “anecdotal reports” of grandparents who voluntarily starved themselves to death for the sake of their descendants.

Better harvests and international food aid ended the worst suffering by 1998. Yet chronic food insecurity and shortages persist to this day. In October, specialists from the United Nations travelled to North Korea to assess current food supplies. They found that “much of the population” had “suffered prolonged food deprivation” between May and September of this year, as rations in the public system were reduced once again, to only one-third of the minimum daily caloric requirement. A wave of malnourished children turned up at North Korean hospitals this autumn, according to the U.N. mission’s report.

It is frustrating to provide food aid to a corrupt, inefficient, militarily aggressive regime that may steal much of what is donated, and will certainly use international support to maintain outsized spending on arms, nuclear bombs, and missiles. Yet hunger cannot be an instrument of international diplomacy. The most pragmatic and humanitarian step the Obama Administration can take to promote stability during North Korea’s political transition is to deliver needed food to the country’s disenfranchised population—and as soon as is practical.

On December 28th, North Korea’s mourning rituals are supposed to climax with another mass gathering in Pyongyang. Of the many tens of thousands citizens assembled in the capital that day, how many will have lost a child, parent, sibling, or neighbor to famine or malnutrition? We might at least look past the formal spectacle to scan the faces in the crowd, and reflect upon causes for mourning in North Korea other than the loss of Kim Jong-il.

Photograph: David Guttenfelder/AP.

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad.